Ever After (Sequel to Once)

I Want To Write You A Song

I want to build you a boat
One that's strong as you are free
So any time you think
That your heart is gonna sink
You know it won't
I want to build you a boat

Everything I need I get from you
Givin' back is all I wanna do

Ally

I don’t know if I’ll ever fully understand why I fell for Harry in the way I did.

Sure, I get the initial attraction. He was funny and smart and kind and I mean, look at him. I know why he intrigued me. But why I fell so intensely, so fast, for so long, I still don’t think I understand. We have hardly anything in common on paper. And yet, somewhere along the way he became my best friend, the love of my life, my partner in everything. We built a whole world that I never want to leave. I know why I love him, of course, but I'm not sure I'll ever quite know how everything managed to fall perfectly into place. That part feels like a fairy tale.

Maybe it was the lasagna. Harry makes a mean lasagna.

But that’s not my point. I’m no artist, so maybe I’ll never understand love completely. I always thought the creatives had a much better handle on it than I did. But even if I don’t understand it entirely, I know to never take it for granted. I know it was the most special gift I have ever been given. To not only find it once, but to be given a second chance when we were finally ready to be everything that we were to one another, it's beyond rare.

Whatever it was, fate, Niall, Lizzie, that led us to each other and back together again, sometimes I think it knew what it was doing all along. We loved each other fearlessly that first time around, jumping in with both feet and finding a happiness neither of us had known before. Even now, we both forget how young we were back then, how little we knew about the world and our place in it, how naive we were.

We had an unexpected innocence, but the intensity of our love meant we shattered when it all went up in flames. No matter how much or how little we still loved each other, neither of us had known heartbreak like this before and we hadn't the faintest clue of how to pick up the fragments. So we left them there, and the glass lay scattered on the ground, just waiting to scar the bottoms of our feet anytime we dared walk there again.

Yet something remained. Our relationship had broken, but our love for each other endured, lying quietly below until our hearts had healed after we were forced to bring it out of hibernation. At the time I had no idea what Zach meant when he saw how much I couldn’t stay away from Harry. That I couldn't stop myself from feeling the love buried so far deep below my anger. But looking back now, I see how obvious it had been, how I couldn’t help but want to be around him, couldn’t help but miss him, couldn’t help but love him. Whether it was pranks or insults or sex, it seems crazy to me now that I hadn’t seen our reconciliation coming. I never stood a chance at anything else.

Maybe that’s what made Harry and Ally 2.0 so special. My heart still warms for the two kids who thought they’d go for a date or two and have a laugh and got so much more than they ever bargained for. But the new us was more cautious, more careful with our hearts. Careful not to scar the other, either.

But that’s part of what made it so wonderful. We knew who we were, now, what we wanted to do and who we wanted to be, alone and together. We knew we could take on whatever came our way. Some people might have taken our time apart as a fear that one of us would leave again. But we looked at it as a strength, knowing that we could find each other again no matter what.

Obviously, no one can know the future. Nothing is without the potential for damage, not years of love and friendship, not building a home together, not marriage (I know, can you believe this muppet actually got me down the aisle?) We can never know what lurks around the corner.